That few New Year’s res­o­lu­tions are kept in full mat­ters less than the recog­ni­tion of defects that need to be addressed. Imag­ine how much of an improve­ment 2026 could be over last year if those who wield pow­er made a few.

The so-called “lega­cy media” could lead the way.
At the bot­tom of a head­line of a “snap­shot of sto­ries”, in a type­face size akin to the side effects warn­ings on patent med­i­cines, the Wash­ing­ton Post saw fit to put: “Sum­ma­ry is AI-gen­er­at­ed, news­room-reviewed.”(My ital­ics)
That seems to imply a belief that seri­ous news con­sumers might not find AI con­tent ques­tion­able at best.
Sir Win­ston Churchill pop­u­lar­ized the quote “…democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.”
The Post mast­head proud­ly pro­claims that  “Democ­ra­cy Dies in Darkness”.
In fact, it is dying in the glare of  the seem­ing­ly unquench­able need of Post own­er Jeff Bezos for MAGA approval at the expense of real journalism.
The same blight is slow­ly gnaw­ing the soul out of my once beloved for­mer employ­er CBS News, cour­tesy of its new own­ers and anoint­ed as opposed to qual­i­fied edi­tor-in-chief Bari Weiss. (One won­ders how long it will be before “Weissed” becomes a syn­onym for “ruined” or “destroyed”)
Their New Years’ res­o­lu­tion could, of course, be to reverse course. But hav­ing already demon­strat­ed an acute igno­rance of the yawn­ing gap between intrin­sic and bot­tom line val­ue, there seems lit­tle pos­si­bil­i­ty of a Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion on the part of beings who rate  prof­it over prin­ci­ple as a legacy.
The inevitable result of that has already begun, in the drain­ing of a tal­ent pool of A‑list broad­cast jour­nal­ists into a pud­dle of “con­tent providers” dredged from unreg­u­lat­ed social media plat­forms and self-pro­mot­ing pod­casts, with no his­to­ry of a sense of news, objec­tiv­i­ty, account­abil­i­ty or balance.
Pre­pare for more reports and Q and A’s that begin along the lines of “Well obvi­ous­ly I mean…” and tail off to the sig­na­ture wis­dom of “We’ll have to wait and see…” to try to cloak the fact that the cor­re­spon­dent (and I use the term light­ly) real­ly has no idea what he/she/whatever is talk­ing about.
We are already see­ing the pre­cur­sor in “news” that accepts what­ev­er is being said with­out ques­tion or caveat, and there­by deliv­ers the human-gen­er­at­ed ver­sion of AI slop.

                    AND ON THE GRANDER STAGE

Not con­tent with hav­ing reduced the civil­ians of Gaza to hud­dling in tents and makeshift shel­ters in the mid­dle of a waste­land of rub­ble,  and cur­tail­ing aid sup­plies to a frac­tion of what is need­ed, Israel is ham­string­ing the means to deliv­er it.
In what amounts to insist­ing that aid work­ers become, in effect, an arm of its intel­li­gence ser­vices, the Israeli gov­ern­ment will revoke the oper­at­ing licences of 37 inter­na­tion­al aid agen­cies work­ing in Gaza and the occu­pied West Bank, if they do not hand over “com­plete”  per­son­al details of their staff.
The Israelis have, with­out offer­ing proof, accused UN and oth­er agen­cies of employ­ing work­ers with links to Hamas.
In an irony you couldn’t make up, an order that will pro­vide yet anoth­er way to abet and exac­er­bate the already dis­grace­ful lev­el of the scourge of anti-Semi­tism, was issued by the Min­istry of Dias­po­ra Affairs and Com­bat­ing Antisemitism
Add that to what is noth­ing short of an ongo­ing process of aping a vari­a­tion of  Kristall­nacht by rad­i­cal right- wing Israeli set­tlers in the Occu­pied West Bank, and there goes every bit of progress from the Abra­ham Accords to chances of a Gaza peace deal, nev­er mind achiev­ing even a modus viven­di between Israelis and Pales­tini­ans to at least step back from con­stant war in the long term, nev­er mind 2026.
The U.S. admin­is­tra­tion could, per­haps, dis­suade Israel from once again being its own worst ene­my, but is too busy try­ing to set the 2026 bar for anoth­er Quixot­ic quest.
Leav­ing aside the dubi­ous legal­i­ty, using what may be — but per­haps for not much longer — the “world’s most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary”, to blast small boats out of the water (and then kill any sur­vivors), with­out proof they are a force of “nar­co-ter­ror­ists” (what­ev­er that means),  makes for pathet­ic optics.
Speak­ing of which, a perusal of his­to­ry might be in order  before the new “Trump Class” (of course) bat­tle­ships are offi­cial­ly commissioned.
The man him­self claims they will be: “the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more pow­er­ful than any bat­tle­ship ever built.”
Viet­nam, Lebanon, Soma­lia, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recent­ly Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions offer ample proof that when it comes to win­ning wars, “biggest, fastest and most pow­er­ful” are akin to the race between the tor­toise and the hare.
Any chance of a res­o­lu­tion to set aside hubris and self-aggrandisement?

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